Last week, I had the crazy idea of installing Windows7 on my netbook. In the end, I think it would have been better use of my time if I just bought a new netbook with Win7 pre-installed as it took me 5 days to get this done!
The tricky thing is that my mini9 has a 8GB SSD as a hard drive. That’s pre-formatted, so it’s only 7.2GB effective space. If I installed stock Win7 then I would be left with something like 600MB after install – and that’s minus the hibernation file or page file (although I typically set VM to 0). Add a few apps, and I can’t do anything with my netbook, so that obviously won’t work.
The solution is to strip down the Windows install and only install the key components. I did this with my prevoius Windows XP install using a program called nLite. For my Win7 journey, I used vLite. The process is fairly simple – you pick what components you don’t need and those are not installed. There are several guides online to say what you shouldn’t remove if you want a running system. So I tried this, and must have gone through the process of stripping and installing something like 15 times to no luck! The reasons behind this were (I thought):
- Corrupted or lingering linux traces within MBR on netbook (since I used GRUB to force XP on)
- SD card problems: bad sectors, incorrect preparation of SD card MBR, incorrect partitioning
- Removing too many components with vLite
- Working with a bad/corrupt Windows7 ISO
- Incorrect settings in BIOS wrt SSD controller
- Incorrect partitioning on SSD
I really thought my problem was #1 because the result was that I would consistently get a digital signing verification failure on winload.exe when trying to boot Windows for the first time (which you can bypass), or a corrupt/missing classpnp.sys. Googling seemed to indicate that this was a problem with the MBR – yet I cleaned it (using diskpart clean all) and overwrote it and rebuilt it (using bootsect and bootrec) many many times without avail.
In the end, it turns out that the problem was because I was using a (not bad nor corrupt) Windows7 ISO that had SP1 integrated. vLite cannot support the SP1 integration (it’s written for Vista really) and I had to use rt7Lite in order to strip the install properly. My first try with rt7Lite worked (although I mistakenly stripped out my WLAN drivers so I had to grab them from Windows Update)!
In the end, I still only had 1GB left over on my SSD after install – although that is with a 2GB hibernation file. It’s usable and actually quite zippy (if Windows Update isn’t doing updates in the background). I also moved up to Firefox4 so I have a completely new interface and almost like a completely new netbook!
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